With the recent adoption and implementation of the Affordable Care Act, there are a great number of changes to our health care system underway designed to expand access to affordable health care to more Americans.

Here in California, we’ve taken the lead in passing the supporting laws and regulations necessary to make the ACA work. This includes the creation of Covered California –- our state’s online health insurance marketplace where individuals and small businesses can shop for health care coverage. Doctors, hospitals, patient advocates, and insurers continue working with health care stakeholder organizations across the state to iron out a million complicated policy details so we can avoid the kind of problems the federal exchange has experienced.

Unfortunately, in the midst of this incredibly complex task of implementing the ACA, a front group for trial lawyers has qualified a measure for the November 2014 ballot that would make additional major changes to our health care system. The measure would give the state Insurance Commissioner -– an elected politician who relies on campaign contributions from special interests to get into office -– sweeping new power over health care, including what benefits and treatments plans cover.

What could go wrong with giving a politician more power over health care, after all?

Although the measure would create massive new health care regulation, the trial lawyer-backed proponents drafted this measure without any input from doctors, patients, hospitals or other health care providers.

A look at the fine print reveals a number of flaws and the real agenda behind the measure: more money for trial lawyers.

1) the measure will harm people’s ability to see their doctor and get the care they need. It grants the Insurance Commissioner new power to approve or reject the benefits offered by health care plans, and thus the kind of treatments covered. Treatment decisions should be made by doctors and patients, not a politician.

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The measure also allows the commissioner to set rates at levels which don’t meet the cost of providing care, resulting in lower reimbursements to physicians, hospitals and other providers. This will result in reduced access to primary care and specialists for patients at a time when we should be expanding that access.

2) The measure will create a more costly bureaucracy that would bleed off millions of dollars of critically-needed funding from patient care. While these costs are ostensibly paid by health insurers, they will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher premiums.

3) Voters should ask themselves: Why would trial lawyers and their allies spend $2 million to qualify such a measure? The answer is simple – follow the money.

Buried in the fine print of the measure are provisions allowing lawyers to file regulatory and legal challenges every time there are changes to a health plan – and get paid for doing so. The proponents behind the measure have already made millions of dollars through this mechanism for other insurance. With this measure, they stand to make tens of millions more.

This not only drives up costs, but it threatens to slow the system of approvals down with an endless series of legal challenges.

Our state is already leading the way on health reform and improving access to affordable care for more Californians. We should focus on making that effort work –- not passing a measure that will drive up costs, hurt access to care and simply line the pockets of the proponents and their friends.